ABSTRACT
The United States produced, over a period of perhaps seventy to eighty years, and most importantly in the first half of the twentieth century, an enormous body of popular music. James Maher estimates (in Wilder 1972, p. xxxviii) that about 300,000 songs were copyrighted from 1900 to 1950. Before that period, American popular song was an amalgam of derivations from European parlor music and some native ballad traditions, including those of the large black population recently released from slavery. It was meant to be performed in the parlors of middle-class people, who owned and knew how to play pianos, flutes, and violins, and is best represented in the work of Stephen Foster.
